1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing device and method, program, and recording medium, and in particular relates to an information processing device and method, program, and recording medium that can effectively determine the similarity between users or contents.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, there have been web services on the Internet and so forth to introduce a certain user to another user. These services promote meetings between users or discovery of new content via other users, and provide a new user experience.
With such a service, user information which is generated by a user using a website is analyzed, and a user to be introduced is determined. “User information” here is information such as history of website usage or content information that a user has disclosed. For example, with a website according to http://www.last.fm, a service is provided wherein the history of music listened to that a user has disclosed is analyzed, whereby a similar user is introduced.
With such a service, for example services which introduce users that match a portion of the usage history of the user or content disclosed by the user (i.e. user information) make up a majority of the services.
Also, a technique has been proposed, for example, to generate appropriate user preference information as vectors in order to recommend content (e.g. Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-165632).